Well I’ve got to say that I’ve never been an advocate for the whole online meeting thing. But this one is kind of fun. The NY guy saw a girl on a train and had just plucked up enough courage to talk to her, when she disappeared. He then put up a website with the small hope of tracking her down, and did!

The homework monsters slam down hard sometimes, Friday’s post has been delayed until now.

On Thursday I bit the bullet of my, ‘avoid city driving where possible’ rule and drove to work. It’s a bit funny really, because work moved offices on Friday and of all the time I’ve been working at the Albert Park office (equivalent to almost two years), I’ve never driven in. It’s been the train and the tram with my beloved Connex. But for the sake of a free desk chair when your one has had a broken wheel for two months, you’ll do anything.

So I drove in. The right turn I was meant to make turned out to not be a right turn due to the No Right Turn sign, so I detoured somehow via Prahran (near uni) and got to work a bit late. No huge drama.

Seven and a half hours later, the chair fit nicely into my currently very dilapidated car and I set off back home. I managed to do something wrong again and wound up driving through a very busy street in the city during peak hour. Slightly terrifying, but I worked out where the freeway was fairly quickly and found the way home.

Here’s the ironic thing.

We moved offices on Friday – a few suburbs across the city to a beautiful and beautifully restored terrace house. I’ll share photos when I can. But the strange way that I drove home wound up being exactly the way I drove to the new place with Ian.

Then get this. I’ve been crapping on about how I’m in love with Barcelona chairs for a few posts now and suddenly I find out that work is getting some (replicas I assume, and they are white) but I mean what is the likely hood of that! Hearing that pulled my internal grin onto my face.

A beautiful day (yesterday) was dampened momentarily when a guy who was quite drunk decided to sit next to me on the train. It was the middle of the day, the guy was drinking quite consistently and only hid his bottle when the ticket inspectors came around. It was one of those slightly awkward situations where you don’t know whether to move or not – true it has put you slightly on edge and that’s a bit of a bummer because you were very much enjoying the sun, but you still want to be friendly (or in the least, inoffensive) – there are some things you just leave alone when you’re a girl by herself on public transport.

Anyway, the long and short of it was that I decided that I’d stay where I was, there were enough others on the train and he was rambling outloud quite interestingly.

“You are a slave unless you are extremely wealthy.”

“I’m only drunk because I like being drunk”

“Today I am NOT a slave!”

“We are all slaves.”

I was thinking a bit about the whole slave and free thing in the Bible – you get your typical passages along with plenty of others.

A very small bite of 2 Peter 2 (a part of the Bible I never seem to get around reading):

“They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. ” (v.19)

and,

“I’m only drunk because I like being drunk.”

As irrational as being drunk makes you, this statement is interesting.

We often declare responsibility for our actions as a pretense for something that we truthfully cave to. It looks OK externally. We show the world our ‘in moderation’ but in all honesty we are being run by our addiction , or our ‘interests’, our ‘I’m just being helpful’, or, ‘They can’t cope without me’.

“I’m only doing it because I want to.”

We refuse to acknowledge outloud and sometimes even to ourselves that there is something else deeper that is driving us.

We are slaves to what has mastered or is trying to master us. We need to recognise what that is.

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery… You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.” (Gal 5:1,7-9)